Professional Football Researchers Association Forum

This was brought up in a different thread but I don't remember which one. I hadn't watched this movie in several years, so I re-watched it last night. It's actually a very good movie and probably more realistic than it gets credit for. I think it is also an accurate reflection of the Dallas Cowboys culture during the Schramm/Landry era. One final thought is that Danny Bunz looks exactly like Gary Busey.

Unfortunately, I've never read the book but I did see the movie (as mentioned right here on the forum!) right before the beginning of this season and the line that sticks with me the most from it is from late in the movie when the player played by John Matuszak loses his cool in the locker room with someone from the front office and says something like: "Any time we call it a game you *ssholes say 'it's a business' and any time WE says 'it's a business' YOU *ssholes say 'it's a game'!" Something tells me that sentiment still holds weight in the game we see today.

As in most cases book is better than the movie but the movie is one of the best football movies---if not the best--ever. Football is harder to do than baseball movies... there are a lot of good baseball movies.

Only a few really good football ones and most of those from college or high school ... I'd recommend reading the book, plus "Texas Celebrity Turkey Trot" and also "The Franchise"

All three are gems from Peter Gent

An old ESPN Page 2 column about “North Dallas Forty” …

http://www.espn.com/page2/s/closer/021101.html

Any Given Sunday is good as well. It brought up the idea of the "rewarding failure/tanking concept" from team ownership way before the Flores lawsuit, that has been conveniently swept under the rug.

NDF is very 70s, and the football scenes aren't fantastically realistic, but I will take Mac Davis as Seth Maxwell any day of the week and twice on (any given) Sunday. Nolte also channels Gent/Phil Elliott very well. There are a lot of good performances and it's (spoiler alert) not the happy ending of most sports movies (though, thankfully not nearly as unhappy as the book), but it's one of my faves.

There are so many great lines in addition to Tooz's, like (and I think this made it into the trailer) when Maxwell is describing his wild night out the night before and says, "And that's not the weird part!" Elliott says, "The weird part?" And Maxwell says, "Yeah, it gets weird!" (Also spoiler alert: the story was pretty weird up to that point.)

This, like Gent's work, hits the dark side of the game, whereas Semi-Tough (another one I love) is for laughs and charming (though has lines you absolutely could not include today) because Burt Reynolds is SO good in it and it's just fun.

But back to Gent, yeah, North Dallas After Forty is good (but sad) and I must have re-read The Franchise like four times because it's so layered and such an indictment. I always wanted that to be a film, but after Any Given Sunday covered a lot of that ground and given it would have had to be four hours long, I can see why that never happened.